Albert's swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts devastates the western United States

Background. Rocky Mountain locusts became more of a problem in the 19th century as farming expanded westward into the grasshoppers' favored habitat. Plagues visited Minnesota in 1856–1857 and again in 1865, while Nebraska suffered repeated infestations between 1856 and 1874. The last major swarms came between 1873 and 1877, when the locusts caused $200 million in crop damage in Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and other states. Within this period, a famous 1875 sighting estimated one swarm at 198,000 square miles—greater than the area of California.

Devastation. The swarm destroyed crops, leather, wood, and wool. Farmers described the locusts as a white cloud or snowstorm. Control attempts using gunpowder, fires, and specialized plows failed. The infestation led to legislative responses, including mandatory labor in Nebraska and bounty programs in Missouri, reflecting the severity of the agricultural crisis.

Legacy. A semi-fictionalized description of the devastation created by Rocky Mountain locusts in the 1870s appears in Laura Ingalls Wilder's semi-autobiographical novel On the Banks of Plum Creek, based on actual incidents in western Minnesota during the summers of 1874 and 1875 as the locusts destroyed her family's wheat crop. In 1877, German-American Catholic pioneer farmers established Assumption Chapel in Cold Spring, Minnesota, a Christian pilgrimage shrine supposedly to keep away future locust plagues like those they had faced in the 1850s and 1870s. Settlers' plowing and irrigation, along with trampling by cattle and other farm animals near streams and rivers in the Rocky Mountains, destroyed the locusts' eggs in the areas where they permanently lived, ultimately causing their demise.